For moments, the two were entwined like this in the passenger seat of her Oldsmobile, a car she and her brother shared. The orange track still seared bright behind his eyelids when he shut them to kiss her. She pressed her mouth to his with urgency while he returned with compassion, and he knew – in the way a child knows on which crank the jack springs from the box – that this was not enough to satiate her.

Wiping a remnant tear from her cheek, she smiled and reached for the button on her jeans, watching him. He abruptly covered her hands with his.

"Don't," he mumbled. "Don't take those off."

"Oh - do you want to?" She pressed his hands against her fly. He had to swallow and pause to remember how to speak.

It could be simple; he could make it so. As he stroked her toned belly with his thumbs, the idea of undressing her appealed to him more than undressing her properly, on a bed, in the respectable precincts of a relationship. It embarrassed him that he wanted it all done right or not done at all – a luckless streak of idealism he had unwillingly inherited from Gyatso.

Katara, object of his dreams for almost two months now, here before him in reality – straddling his lap and offering to take off her pants. Her own pants. If he knew this was bound to happen on his routine morning run, he would have camped out on the field last night or in the lot, lighting candles in a makeshift alter and waiting for her to materialize before him in her car, the goddess of his spirit delivered to him at last.

But he didn't know. And he was largely unprepared.

"I do I do," he said. "More than anything, I do. But – not here. Like this." He wiped the fogged window to this right and peered out of it, nervously imagining Sokka in the neighboring truck with a club over his shoulder, at the ready.

"Like what?"

"In your car. At six in the morning. Doesn't it seem…"

"Seem like what?" Agitated and rebuffed, she buttoned her blouse, which she had unbuttoned for him only moments before. No one had ever denied her, much less stopped her from moving forward in any direction she chose. Hurt ego aside, it was as if he was willingly returning the greatest gift he could receive. Even the smug pro-bender Zuko, in those early months, had lied back with a contented grin as she pleasured herself with his body. No boy had ever told her to stop – only she had held the power of refusal. Headaches and early morning exams aside – even Katara used "not tonight" sparingly.

Aang, meanwhile, had strained himself with the grand effort of not looking at her full breasts, captives in a simple black bra that conveniently clipped in the front. Focusing on this silver clip earlier, centered perfectly on the strip of her sternum, and imagining undoing it, kept him from actually undoing it. Though he noted miserably, being nothing short of a man and nothing greater, the clip's proximity to his teeth.

She fastened her buttons quickly, avoiding glancing up at him, and when she reached her neck she grunted as she made her way back to the driver's seat. She extended her leg over the lever and over him. He watched her go back and turned to her in his seat, holding his orange cap over the erection that refused to let his sweatpants settle.

"I know what you're thinking. I like you a lot," he started, happy that her kisses had eased his nervous stutter that morning. He took her hand from her crossed arms and pulled at it. She regarded him coolly but he could see, even in the terribly weak light, that she was blushing. She let him have her hand as she stared stubbornly at the steering wheel. To her surprise, she felt his lips brush against her knuckles. He kissed each of her fingers until she turned to watch him.

This was enough, she thought, the magnetic humming in her body dissipating, leaving her. Here was Aang's soft mouth exploring the contours of her knuckles, the valleys between them – she was excited at his contact, scared at the newness of his minimalism. With only her hand and his lips, he made her feel as though she was soaring above Four Nations University, above the lot and the Oldsmobile and the dormitories. More than any of her lovers had done with their entire bodies, given the entirety of hers. She wondered, ashamed at her growing want and impending curiosity, what he could do if given the expense of an entire orgasm.

He returned her hand to her. "I don't want us to rush into it."

It, she wondered, the noun so clear in his voice that it could have been a name. Mister and misses It. It can't be. It is. It came from below. It came from above. It is what It is.

Quietly caught in her own thoughts, and absentmindedly sending her free hand into the abyss of her messy morning hair, she returned, "So, take things slow?"

"I want to with you."

She hesitated, considering this. "Aang. Can I tell you something?"

"Yeah." He shifted his weight in the seat and grinned, partial to the way she said his name. Breathy and antsy, impatient. "Tell me anything, Katara."

"Okay." She looked at the hand he'd kissed, stroked it with her fingers. "But I – I can't tell you here."

"You want to go back?"

"Suki will be asleep. I want to talk to you alone."

"I don't have a roommate. But I live in 420B…"

"Wow," she laughed, shaking her head. "That awful room? Admins stuffed you there because you transferred late… I'm so sorry."

He shrugged, winked. "I don't have a roommate," he repeated, and she giggled again, that musical laugh that made him catch his breath.

He could build a life, he thought, around that laugh.

Not new to guilt, Zuko had followed her. First he had waited at the door of her dorm room, then – feeling strangely desperate, dawn yet to break across the horizon – he had marched to his car.

He saw her then from afar, descending the ramp from the field to the lot. She sat in her car to warm it and he watched the airbender stride to it, open the passenger door and get in. Zuko assumed they had planned it so that he'd go with her to the clinic this morning after his run. Watching him walk to her, he was suddenly humiliated, his forehead and palms sopping with sweat, his cheeks hot. He revved the engine and peeled out of the lot. He did not look back, though the urge to look at the rearview mirror grew exponentially in seconds.

Katara could replace him in two minutes when given the chance. Here she had replaced him with a relic – a novelty bender, understanding and accepting, timed perfectly as her white knight.

She hadn't told Zuko when she'd go, but he called the clinic and asked. The receptionist denied him the time and date of her appointment until Zuko had lied, his rage breaking the woman's resolute privacy policy, "I'm her husband! I have a right to know."

Why he needed to know, exactly, remained a mystery. When Katara had broken the news to him earlier in the week at her place, he could not meet her gaze. It had been difficult for her at first. She stumbled around the topic hopelessly, finally growing angry enough to put it as plainly as possible.

Zuko was not the easiest to approach with bad news. His temper often shut him down or sent him flying. Katara would complain how apathetic he was, unreceptive and unapproachable. In a good mood, she'd joke, kissing him, "You're lucky you're a good fuck," but in many ways, this was only the truth, and the only truth.

"Happy you took off the condom now?" she wanted to know. "You selfish prick. You selfish fucking prick." She was not tall. Five foot two at most, her beauty was not in an intimidating stature or legs long enough to wrap around him. But she was beautiful, draped in one of his old shirts now (she thought it would ease some benevolence out of him), her hair cascading well below her shoulders in full chocolate waves (she knew how much he loved to hold her hair, throw his hands into it). "Selfish fucking prick," she accused from the kitchen, her back to him, infuriated.

"You let me," he guarded lamely. "You let me."

"I let you!" The cup of tea she was holding hurled towards him as she turned. She missed – he thought, intentionally – but the hot tea sloshed across his shirt as the mug landed safely on the padded carpet behind him. It burned his chest and he removed the shirt, agitated, wanting to hit her.

"That was mature."

"Creative. Says the middle schooler who takes the rubber off. Did you not have sex ed? Or did your father get you out of that too?" She lit a cigarette and stared blankly at him, still standing in the kitchen, her palms pressed on the counter behind her. She faced him wildly.

"Quit blaming me." He stood up and came over , placing his shirt on the counter where she was. Challenging her anger, he said, "Aren't you going to bend it out for me?" When she didn't respond, he started rinsing and wringing it in the sink. It occurred to her to put her cigarette out in his shirt but this afternoon had winded her. She felt vulnerable. Faint.

"I hate you," she informed him in a murmur, her eyes fixed on the couch he'd been sitting in before, as if she could imagine him there. Then her eyes shut without her willing them to. "My brother was right about you. Everyone was right about you. Except me."

"You want my pity?" He spread his shirt on the countertop beside her. They spoke without facing each other, standing in the kitchen, both engrossed with the living room where the assaulted tea darkened the carpet. "You can have my pity since you want it so bad."

"I wanted your love," she said simply.

Before he could respond to her defenselessness, before he could register what she'd admitted, he removed the stack of bills from his pants pocket and set it beside her. He damned himself under his breath. She regarded the stack from the periphery of her view, her heart tightening and tightening like a fist. It was then Aang knocked on the door, his urgent, wide-eyed expression suggesting he knew what existed between them. They attempted to stay polite before him and then Zuko dismissed himself, his conscience anything but clear.

"She's okay," he said to himself now. "She's okay," he repeated. He was driving on the far end of campus, his car still wrecked from the airbender's sky bison, the crash not totally remedied by the garage. Was he so cruel to refuse to register her fear, her anxiety? Only throw money at it? It. It was his fault. Had he become his father? He shivered and moaned, hitting his head against his steering wheel at the next stoplight in resentment.

Did he love her? They fought more than they conversed, the cure for which was make-up sex, an incredible climax of opposites that could keep him at it for hours. She never tired of him, nor he of her, in bed. But outside of the sheets, beyond her pale blue comforter, they could not cloak their distaste for one another.

She had said it herself, he recalled. At last, she'd admitted it, confirmed his suspicions. She hated him.

This was what he forced himself to remember as he pulled up to Mai's home, parking the bruised Beemer in her driveway.